Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, 15th November 2024–28th July 2025 

In the past two decades the art world has increasingly turned its attention to Italian feminism and the contributions of Italian women artists, particularly those active in the twentieth century, among whom is the Sardinian artist Maria Lai (1919– 2013). Despite her posthumous rise to prominence, Lai resists the ever-present tendency to categorise artists as a central tenet of the historicising process. Indeed, she was often the exception: she moved to Venice and then Rome to study art, an extraordinary feat for a woman in the 1930s; she participated in neo-avantgarde practices of the 1970s and 1980s without tying herself to a particular movement; and her adoption of relational artistic practice in the 1980s preceded Nicolas Bourriaud’s theorisation of it by over a decade. 

Curated by Paola Mura, the Artistic Director of Magazzino Italian Art, this retrospective is the first in North America dedicated to Lai’s oeuvre, yet its merits extend far beyond a formal presentation of the artist to a non-Italian audience. The exhibition is a curatorial attempt to challenge the tropes that have facilitated the incorporation of Lai’s work into the discourse of Italian art in the twentieth century. It embraces the nuances of her long, active career by focusing on her preoccupation with her surroundings and how her works rely on viewer activation. Lai has often been described as a ‘marginal’ or ‘isolated’ artist – a characterisation that stems from an oversimplification of her refusal to conform to traditional standards of feminist action, such as belonging to a collective, a political party or formally and explicitly politicising the content of one’s artistic production.[1] By contrast, Mura has rejected this narrative, defining Lai as cultured, self-aware and ‘dura’ (tough): as ‘made of stone like Sardinians are’.[2] 

The exhibition begins with a timeline that presents not only Lai’s life and career but also her contextualisation within Italy’s political, social, historical and wider artistic development throughout the twentieth century. It challenges the narrative of her isolation by pairing photographs of the artist and her work with portraits she took of key figures in her life – including Salvatore Cambuso and Rina and Eugenia Dau – and of works by artists who directly influenced her, such as Arturo Martini and Costantino Nivola. The central theme here is Lai’s engagement with her location as part of her aesthetic and material choices. The show explores how three main locations – Sardinia, Rome and New York – defined her visual language, which has been described by Achille Bonito Oliva and Clarita di Giovanni as ‘glocal’, emphasising how it comprises ‘international languages while still reflecting on the identity of the artist’.[3] 

The first room of the exhibition is intelligently divided by temporary walls, allowing the viewer to traverse chronologically through Lai’s early work. A quotation from the artist is affixed to the wall – ‘I wasn’t born in Sardinia, I am Sardinia’ – accompanied by three landscapes dated between 1952 and 1959, reinforcing the significance of her home region. The first work, a view of Cagliari, contrasts with the other two, which focus instead on Sardinia’s rocky mountains, inhabited by flocks of goats. These two elements, distinct in the second landscape (Fig.16), progressively merge in the third work, an abstract composition in which goats and rocks are almost indistinguishable. Throughout the 1960s Lai gradually removed all figurative traces from her work. Although she still created landscapes, she began to sculpturally activate the pictorial surface by using such materials as oil, cork and straws. Of particular interest are four compositions from 1968, the same year that she first visited the United States, which present textured surfaces influenced by the futuristic visual language associated with the Space Race. 

The 1970s were a turning point in Lai’s practice, defined in the exhibition as a moment of ‘artistic metamorphosis’. She began creating Telai (Looms; Fig.18), a series of sculptural compositions inspired by the matriarchal Sardinian textile tradition. Such works continue Lai’s interest in materiality while also introducing relational aspects, which would remain a core feature of her artistic practice. Following the progression of contemporary Italian art movements, such as Arte Povera, which championed the use of humble materials and found objects, Lai began defining her artistic lexicon. She incorporated threads, fabric, canvas – which she would often dye bright colours, ranging from blue and red to orange – and even bread. In highlighting the connection between Lai and the Italian avant-garde of the 1970s, the show further disproves the notion that she adopted an isolationist approach to art making. The Telai are often seen as a result of the ten-year hiatus that the artist took from the art world, beginning in 1957, in which she chose not to exhibit and also to avoid much of the wider art scene, instead focusing on radical and material exploration. Here, however, the works are presented as a product of her engagement with her contemporaries.[4] 

On the ground floor, photographs documenting the artist’s performance Legarsi alla montagna (Bound to the mountain; 1981) are displayed in a small hallway that leads to the final gallery. These images connect the two main themes of the exhibition: Lai’s material connection with the world around her and the centrality of ‘otherness’ in her work. For the performance Lai used over twenty-seven metres of blue ribbon, asking her fellow Ulassai citizens to tie it through each house in the village all the way to Mount Gedili, the highest mountain nearby. The black-and-white photographs of local residents tying the ribbon – the only coloured detail – succinctly capture the significance of Lai’s collaborative work, in which an entire town bonded themselves together and to their surroundings. Also displayed in this hallway are Maria Pietra (1991) and Tenendo per mano l’ombra (Holding the shadow by the hand; 1987), in which Lai reinterpreted old Sardinian stories and myths. Like most of her artist books, which the artist sewed together, these works are illegible, composed of various scraps of fabric, varying from red, pink and green to various patterns. Nonetheless, their display replicates the reading experience: the small space creates a sense of intimacy and privacy, and the decision to entirely ‘unfold’ the two concertina books allows the audience to experience each ‘story’ both linearly and in its entirety. 

The last gallery focuses on the importance of viewer activation in Lai’s creative logic, as well as the role of weaving and sewing. Books, sheets and maps are created by weaving together different fabrics, and are intended to be read, held or decoded (Fig.17). The show culminates with Lai’s final relational work of art, Essere è tessere (To be is to weave; 2008), a collaboration with the inhabitants of Aggius, a small village in Sardinia. The project resulted in the creation of four large canvases, in which the artist spells out – in an uncharacteristically legible text – her stances on art, politics and civil responsibility. With this nal work, the show solidi es its rejection of the narrative of the isolated woman. Instead, it locates Lai as an active participant in the transformations that surrounded her: an artist who cultivated political, philosophical and aesthetic sensibilities that remained lucid and poignant throughout a century of upheaval in Italy.

[1] Until the mid-2010s most of the curatorial and academic output around Lai’s work was supported by AD Arte Duchamp, Cagliari, which represented her. For more recent scholarship on her work, see B. Pietromarchi and L. Lonardelli, eds: exh. cat. Maria Lai: Tendendo per Mano il Sole, Rome (MAXXI) 2019, esp. p.10; C. Di Giovanni: Maria Lai: Ansia d’Infinito, Cagliari 2013, esp. p.33; F. D’Amico and G. Murtas: exh. cat. Maria Lai: Inventare altri Spazi, Cagliari (Associazione Culturale Prospettive) and Rome (Scuderie di Palazzo Ruspoli) 1993–94, esp. p.10; and G. Rossi: La Fata Operosa: Vita e Opere di Maria Lai, Monza 2015, in which the word ‘fata’ translates as ‘fairy’. 

[2] Paola Mura, in conversation with the present author, 14th February 2025. 

[3] Di Giovanni, op. cit. (note 1), p.19. 

[4] Throughout her career, Lai pointed to Alberto Burri, Piero Manzoni and Pino Pascali as her references within the Italian neoavant- garde. See Pietromarchi and Lonardelli, eds, op. cit. (note 1), pp.55 and 129.